Fear because of the power his dead hand seemed to wield over otherwise unimpressable teachers and loathing because of the apparently insurmountable gulf between his Early Modern English and my unwillingness to even try and decipher it.

For most 12-year-olds it was probably not a major issue, but I had just moved with my family from the south Wales valleys to Stratford upon Avon.

Worse, I was a pupil in the very school Shakespeare was said to have once attended, so naturally he was a permanent and frequent fixture on the curriculum.